Badlands is an ambitious and pacy thriller in the Buchan tradition. The author, now in her late eighties, has travelled the world and springs many surprises on her readers, using her deep understanding of the human condition. Two characters - for different motives - manage to reveal the cause of the murders and corruption.

Badlands opens with the horror of a man graduallywaking to find himself fully and sharply dressed on a hotel bed in theHighlands with no memory of who he is or how he got there. And he is not alone,a secondary horror which drives him to seek the help of a girl in a pub beforehe takes off on a flight through the landscape in search of answers and anidentity.

The girl inthe pub, herself a stranger, is on a quest to unlock family secrets that arerooted in Vienna. Two characters, an amnesiac man stumbling around thecountryside and a single-minded young woman forced by circumstance to reconnectwith her Austrian roots, carry the plot and their paths cross and divide asthey gradually work towards its eventual resolution.